She’s having a hard time right now because you’re not what she expected. But we’re never what our parents expected. They have to learn that lesson.

Here was her mother sitting down across from her, reaching for her hands and chafing them as if she were frozen. She felt the rub of her mother’s wedding ring against her skin, and her mother’s face swam into focus, her brown eyes full of the sharp worry of love, and Lily thought, You will never look at me like this again.

The word felt dangerous, and also powerful, as if uttering it would summon someone or something.

Birds. They’ve been all over the news. Birds crashing into skyscrapers; dozens of birds dying randomly in some suburb in Virginia. Birds. So when you said a bird crashed your car –.

Perhaps that was the most perverse part of this: the inside-outness of everything, as if denial would make it go away, when it only made the pain in her chest tighten, when it only made her emotions clearer.

It wasn’t like chocolate, Lily thought. It was like finding water after a drought. She couldn’t drink enough, and her thirst made her ashamed, and the shame made her angry.

Fairies were drawn to in-between times like Midsummer’s Eve, when the full weight of summer begins to tip the shorter days of Autumn; or Souls Night, when the spirits of the newly departed walk the land.

Wake up. You are here.

To charge someone with love is a great responsibility; there will be an equal yet unexpected reaction.

Haven’t you ever wondered what it would be like to have nothing keeping you attached to the ground?